Tips, news and commentary for business-to-business journalists, from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

Back to the Future

Update, Sept. 1, 2009: McCracken has written an answer post on Technologizer, “The Future–August 1999 Style!” Read it to see his take on how the reality of 2009 stacks up with these 1999 predictions.

Looking back at our news archives, we found an interesting piece titled "Future News: What will our jobs be like a few years from now?" published August 1999. The article was written by Harry McCracken, who was the secretary for the ASBPE Boston Chapter at the time. (He later became the editor-in-chief of PC World and is now editor of Technologizer.) McCracken came up with the response "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's News in the Future project offers some answers."

Here is the article he wrote in 1999. How "on target" was it?

Since 1985, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory has been at the forefront of research into electronic publishing, imaging, digital music, artificial intelligence, and other technologies.

Recently, members of the Boston chapter toured the Lab and listened to a thought-provoking talk by Professor Walter Bender, director of the Media Lab’s News in the Future (NiF) research consortium, a group devoted to exploring technology’s potential to make news media more efficient, relevant, convenient, and timely.

Media Lab Projects

Media Lab researchers demonstrated or discussed the following projects, among others, with members:

Electronic paper.

The Lab is developing an inexpensive, flexible material that looks and acts like paper, but can display information that can be changed electronically, without the use of consumable materials. Its inventors believe that this medium could eventually be used to produce a computer for about $10.

A notepad that listens.

The Lab has developed a reporter’s steno pad with a built-in digital audio recorder. As the user records an interview or other event and jots notes on it, the notes and audio are synchronized; later, the user can select any note on the page and listen immediately to the corresponding sound bite.

High-tech product placement.

Attendees saw a soap-opera video clip in which all of the items depicted — clothing, furniture, and more — had been electronically identified and cataloged. Using an electronic pointer, the viewer can pick any on-screen item and see its name, its price, and details on ordering it from J.C. Penney (which funded this project).

Web sites that turn senior citizens into journalists.

Silver Stringers is an NiF program that helps senior citizens report on news in their communities and publish it on the Web. Take a look at stringers.media.mit.edu.

The world’s smartest coffee machine.

Not a media-related innovation per se, but any java-loving journalist will envy the Lab’s own coffee machine. Stick your own mug (with a special chip on the bottom) under the dripper, and the coffee brews to your exact preferences — while a radio plays your favorite station.

How the Net Will Change News

The discussion with News in the Future director Walter Bender was wide-ranging, focusing as much on philosophical issues as technological ones.

Because almost anyone can publish information on the Internet, Bender believes that many consumers will become de facto journalists themselves — and therefore be increasingly demanding of the media. Of participants in the Silver Stringers Web-publishing project, Bender says that "their relationship with [newspapers] has changed — they’re more critical, more engaged. As people’s level of engagement rises, they’re not going to tolerate sloppy journalism.

"What people want are not answers but questions," Bender told the event’s attendees. "They want things that will get them to think, that let them be part of the discourse. I’m after making news harder — if you’re going to be involved, you’ll actually have to think a bit."

Members’ Questions

Among Bender’s answers to attendees' questions:

What will happen to editors?

"Editors become more and more valuable — people are looking for judgment. The service an editor provides in print is transferable [to electronic media]."

Will old-media brands thrive online?

"CNN and USA Today have done a good job. On the other hand, it seems that you can create a new brand online, and it can happen pretty quickly. A lot of organizations have thrown away their opportunity — not that they can’t recover."

Will consumers pay for online news?

"Most news is going to be free online — the economics will be such that the bottom line is that if you have eyeballs, you have a vehicle for deriving revenue. But if you don’t have something that people are interested in, it doesn’t matter."

Will print media be crushed by electronic competition?

"Tell me a medium that’s ever gone away. They change in purpose, but they never die. Text is so damn efficient — I can read and skim in a way that I can’t do with audio or video."

Competitive E-News Strategy In a Rat Race Environment

By Howard Rauch

How are some of us surviving in an e-news content environment that seems to be assuming rat race proportions? The situation is getting to be an old story: Publication Y's competitor — Publication X — launches an e-newsletter, so Y follows suit. Who'll staff this new project? Why the same people who edit Y's magazine … what else? Then X goes twice a week. Y cannot be left behind. Then out of nowhere, competitor Z weighs in with a daily. What now for X and Y, especially since there's no budget for added staff necessary to generate credible content on a multi-frequency basis?

The above scenario clearly suggests that in many X vs. Y competitive analysis evaluations, obvious e-news weaknesses will stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. So while there's still time, you need to strengthen your position against any competitive assault. To this end, seek answers to the following three questions:

(1) Do I offer sufficient variety in every issue or has my content become predictable? One way to learn the truth is by running a source analysis based on breaking stories featured in e-newsletters during the past three months. You may find you are in a rut in terms of overusing convenient sources of information.

(2) Do I offer ample coverage of key topics? Are my competitors outdoing me where it counts in terms of reporting key developments? During one project, I came across a site with a "daily news" link that led visitors to a choice of nine hot topics. Yes, there may not be breaking news every day in each category. But the editors clearly had established target areas of information that had maximum site visitor appeal. Many of us lack this strategy. Instead, we publish whatever e-news happens to be available in order to fill space two or three times a week.

(3) How do site visitors rate your current e-news coverage? You don't need a shotgun e-blast survey to get decent feedback. If you've got an editorial board of ten or more authoritative members, sound them out. Is available e-content clearly superior to what had been available in print sections? In what areas of coverage have your competitors surpassed you?

While all this analysis is ongoing, start setting goals for improving e-news content delivery in terms of eight areas I've identified in previous columns [Editor’s note: See here,here, and here.]:

2009 Digital Azbee Call for Entries Reminder

The time is right for entering the only digital competition exclusively for B2B editorial, sponsored by ASBPE, your nonprofit professional editorial association. The deadline has been extended by a week.

SEO Best Practices

By Maureen Alley

The practice of search engine optimization is foreign to some journalists. Though it is a growing practice with some publishing houses that require their journalists to implement SEO on their websites, its still leaves some journalists scratching their heads.

SEO can be a very complex practice, but it can also be very simple. You should be doing at least the basics to guarantee that your content will get a good ranking on search engine results and will get found by Web users. Below are a few basics to implement that will get your SEO off the ground. Once you understand these, you can move to more complex SEO practices. But for now, these are a must.

2. Use keywords that are commonly searched. A good rule of thumb is to pick keywords that are searched at least 25 times a day by users.

3. Put keywords in your headlines. Journalists like to use creative headlines that don't necessarily hit the mark with search engines. Remember you want people to find your online content, so if you're going to make creative headlines put a few keywords in there as well.

4. Use keywords throughout your content. Good quality content is a must, but so is having keywords. You need both of these for good SEO —not one or the other.

5. Use keywords in your links. For example, if you want someone to read another article, don't hyperlink the words "Click here to read more." Hyperlink the name of the article (which should have keywords in it).

6. Make sure your URLs have keywords and aren't generic. Some posts will automatically use the date of the post as the permalink. Customize your permalink so it includes the headline or keywords. For example, www.maureenalley.com/8_18_2009 versus www.maureenalley.com/seo_best_practices.

7. Know how search engines work. Look at titles and descriptions that appear on search engine results. When you create the title and description tags of your Web pages, remember to include keywords (and keyword phrases of two or three words). Also note that amount of characters search engines display are all different.

8. Let someone know when you've linked to them. Search engines look at the quality of links pointing to your site to determine the credibility of your site. When you tell other people that you've written about them, they may link to your content on their site.

9. Get your content out there. The more sources that syndicate your content, the more chances of someone picking up your content and linking to it.

10. Constantly refresh your content, because search engines like it. Search engines are more likely to visit sites that are always updating content.

To move into the realm of good SEO, you need to wear both a journalist hat and Web hat. Thinking only as a journalist will inhibit your Web success just as it will if you only think as a Web professional. Combine your talents for ultimate exposure and success. Good luck!

Maureen Alley is managing editor for Website Magazine,a trade publication dedicated to Web professionals. She was formerly managing editor forResidential Design & Buildmagazine, a property of Cygnus Business Media. Alley graduated with a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and is currently attending Roosevelt University in Chicago for her Masters of Science in Journalism. She has been a member of ASBPE since 2006 and was a judge for the 2009 Azbee Awards program. She writes a blog atwww.maureenalley.com about young journalists and new media. Contact her at malley13[at]gmail[dot]com.

Raising the Barr (Award)

By Roy HarrisASBPE Foundation President

When jurors for this year’s Stephen Barr Award selected American Farriers Journal editor Frank Lessiter — for his remarkable series on equine abuse, a shameful but little-known part of competitions among “gaited horses” — Lessiter became the sixth business-to-business writer chosen to receive ASBPE's top individual prize for feature writing.

Further, the latest winner once again extended the widely diverse range of work honored with the Stephen Barr Award, which is keyed to evidence of “inventiveness, insight, balance, depth, and impact.”

The first one, in 2004, went to Adam Minter, a Shanghai-based freelance journalist who had produced a groundbreaking series on the Chinese recycling industry for Scrap magazine. It was a series, focusing on China's rapidly expanding, but then little-understood role as a repository for the world's refuse, and especially hard-to-process computer parts. Since then, winners have been recognized for work on legal affairs (John Gibeaut, ABA Journal); swimming-pool drownings (Shabnam Mogharabi, Aquatics International); Harvard missteps in a Russian initiative (David McClintick, Institutional Investor); and fuel choices by trucking companies (David Cullen, FleetOwner.)

What all six writers have in common — besides the handsome crystal trophies on their mantles — is that their stories won over a prestigious pair of jurors, who spent weeks analyzing the best journalism among national gold-award winners in the year's Azbee competition. This year’s jurors — long-time journalists and educators George Gendron and Lou Ureneck — have been involved with Stephen Barr Award judging since the beginning.

Gendron, perhaps best known for his two decades as editor-in-chief of Inc. magazine, now is director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Clark University in Massachusetts — a program he founded. Years ago, Gendron also created the Inc. 500, the annual listing of America's fastest-growing private companies.

Ureneck, now the director of Boston University's journalism program, formerly was deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and before that the editor and vice president of Maine's Portland Press Herald. He has been editor-in-residence at Harvard's Neiman Foundation, where he pursued a comparative study of the methods of historians and the practices of journalists. He is also a frequent commentator on national media issues.

In past years, Gendron and Ureneck have been joined by Walter V. Robinson, a veteran Boston Globe reporter and editor who now holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Boston’s Northeastern University. As assistant managing editor for investigations, Robinson headed the paper's Spotlight Team, whose projects included the Pulitzer Prize-winning disclosures of sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests, and a Church cover-up of the situation.

Since helping to found the Stephen Barr Award — endowed by Stephen’s parents not long after his death from cancer at age 43 — I have been honored to coordinate the judging process, and to work with these busy journalists as they give their time to ASBPE matters. Their dedication to candor, to six years of “getting it right,” no matter how long it took, has been truly impressive.

But my favorite job related to the Stephen Barr Award is sneaking behind the backs of the unsuspecting winners, and maneuvering with associates and relatives to make sure that recipients will be in the audience, to get the surprise of their lives. So far, four of the our six winners have been in attendance — to be blindsided from the lectern at the Azbee Awards of Excellence banquet. This year, Frank Lessiter's son Michael managed to persuade his dad to make the trip, knowing that his father was about to receive the honor of a lifetime.

Wharton Seminar for Business Journalists

APPLY NOW: Wharton Seminar for Business Journalists

Each year, the National Press Foundation offers two all-expense-paid fellowships to working print and broadcast journalists for the annual Wharton Seminar for Business Journalists, which takes place in October of each year at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The fellowships include full tuition, housing, most meals and round trip transportation. The deadline for applications is 5 p.m. on Sept. 4. For more information, please visit the website.

The seminars offer participants an opportunity to expand their knowledge of business by attending courses conducted by leading Wharton faculty, hear guest lectures by business leaders, and compete in an intensive, computer-simulated strategic management exercise. The recipient of the Freddie Mac Foundation fellowship will also receive tutoring on housing and housing finance from a faculty member.

Applications will not be returned. Applicants must submit:

1. a letter stating why they wish to participate2. a letter of support from a supervisor3. work sample, a clip or a video/audio tape (copies are acceptable)4. a brief bio5. application form (available here).

Friends of the late Frank Holeman, a former associate director of the foundation; the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Freddie Mac Foundation have endowed this NPF fellowship.

Survey: E-News Needs Higher Level of Editing, Enterprise

By Howard Rauch

What were some of us thinking when we launched an e-news program? Did we realize that content delivery had to be considerably better than the traditional approach found in print news sections? Some of us got the message and are doing a terrific e-news job. Others seem content to fill space regularly with press announcement rewrites. And far too many e-news packages are burdened by endless sentences and slow-poke leads.

The above harangue is based on current results of a 50-site e-news study I undertook several months ago. As of now, I have reviewed 31 sites delivering 279 e-news articles and expect to go beyond the 50 target. Here are a few basic editing practices requiring improvement:

Identify an article's importance within the first ten words. Every time we use a source-first/news second format, we diminish immediacy. Further, if e-news is supposed to launch quickly into an article, too many of us head in the wrong direction. To illustrate, I found 123 articles (44.1 percent) where the opening sentence ran 30 words or longer.

Observe the "universality of interest" principle. All breaking e-news story must impact the majority of our readers in some significant way. We defeat that purpose if we regularly run standard vendor announcements (like rep appointments, a new catalog or plant expansion) under the banner of hot news.

Build maximum urgency into headlines. As an ongoing judge of the "best headlines" category in ASBPE's awards competition, I apply two tests to every entry:

(1) Does the headline reflect what was discovered as opposed to what was covered?

(2) If the article is packed with hot numbers, does the headline exude a quantitative flavor?

Within my current sample group, writers do okay with (1). But delivery on (2) is disappointing.

Enterprise is a non-event. One reason for this shortfall undoubtedly is that many publications are not staffed up to deliver exclusive material. Many editors I know would love to do better, but website cost structures are steeper than anticipated. In those cases, we do the best we can. Anyway, evidence of enterprise is lacking in 182 articles reviewed. That's a disappointing 65.2 percent of total articles examined.

For additional details on survey findings, please consult my website: www.editsol.com. Competitive analysis has not yet become a significant factor in the e-news arena. When it does happen, many non-enterprising sites will be targets for more aggressive publishers armed with dedicated e-news staffs.

Where Is B2B as U.S. Gets Reinvented?

If you read the daily, traditional media, you might believe these “facts”:

50 million Americans have no access to health care.

The cap-and-trade system being debated in Congress will help the U.S. reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thereby help reduce global warming.

The stimulus bill, formally known as the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, is pumping $787 billion into the economy and creating several million jobs.

General Motors had a hidebound, political culture and that is why it failed. The new CEO has set out to change all that.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says windmills off the Eastern shore of the U.S. could generate 1,000 gigawatts of electricity.

The last statement is true, but it is patently absurd. The others represent the Obama administration party line, but contain demonstrable half-truths, falsehood and highly debatable points.

Yet this is what people read day in and day out in the newspapers, and what they hear on television. One fact that is true: politicians and political activists of all stripes are using statistics and highly interpreted “facts” to try and remake the American economy in an extremely expensive and risky set of schemes.

And so there is a perfect opportunity for the trade, business-to-business press to cut through the nonsense with its deep knowledge of narrow markets and the economics that drive them. Engineering publications can sort myth from reality about wind power. Management and finance-focused publications should be able to write in more deeply informed ways about companies like General Motors or Bank of America.

Yet the trade press is filled with optimistic headlines about how programs like the stimulus bill is helping our industry, whatever it might be. It is mainly the bloggers who are analyzing and finding the holes in popular shibboleths. There are exceptions. A story this month in Medical Economics blew holes in the growing disaster for physicians that is Massachusetts mandatory health coverage. But for the most part, you could hardly tell from the B2B media that the federal government is on the verge of upending perhaps 50 percent of the U.S. economy. Of all times, this is when the perception and discernment of people who know what they are talking about needs to come to the fore and join the debate.

Listen to Temin weekday mornings 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. at Federal News Radio 1500 AM in Washington D.C. and read his federal market analysis fortnightly at FedInsider.com and follow his IT and media blog posts at Meritalk.com.